Chapter 16 : Education and the Mass Media

The textbook authors include a discussion of Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about cultural capital and the process by which this form of capital is transmitted from one generation to the next. One indicator of cultural capital is a parent's education; both the quantity and quality of the education obtained by a parent can have important consequences for the child's educational career. For instance, more highly educated parents are generally able to provide their children with a wider range of educational opportunities, including access to better schools, than parents whose formal education was minimal. In this project, we will investigate the relationship between the level of education attained by parents and the subsequent level of education attained by their children.

Part I:

Fortunately, the General Social Survey (GSS) provides information on the amount of education attained by the respondent and his/her father and mother. We will begin by examining the effect that a father's educational attainment has on his children. You can access GSS data by going to the Survey Documentation and Analysis site at the University of California, Berkeley. Follow these steps:

1. Choose the Frequencies or crosstabulation option and then click "Start."
2. At the SDA Tables Program screen enter in ROW section, EDUC (r: 0-8 "< HS"; 9-11 "Some HS"; 12 "HS grad"; 13-15 "Some College"; 16 "College"; 17-20 "Graduate").
3. Your column variable will be the respondent's father's educational attainment. For COLUMN type in: PAEDUC (r: 0-8 "< HS"; 9-11 "Some HS"; 12 "HS grad"; 13-15 "Some College"; 16 "College"; 17-20 "Graduate").

Once you have obtained your output, you can fill in the cells in Table 1.

Writing Assignment 1:

If there is a perfect correspondence between the father's educational attainment and that of his children, we would expect all our results to fall along the diagonal. As you can see from this table, that is not the case. At the same time, you can see a relationship between the two variables. Look first at fathers with a graduate degree. What percent of children whose fathers have earned a graduate degree also earn a graduate degree? Now look at fathers who never finished high school. What percent of their children never finished high school either? Where is the correspondence between a father's education and a child's education the strongest? (Hint: Examine each of the columns for fathers' educational attainment level to find out where the largest column percentage is located.)

What do those cells that are above, or to the right, of the diagonal reflect? What about those below, or to the left, of the diagonal? In general, in those instances where a child has attained more education than his/her father, how much farther has he/she gone?

Part II:

Do you think that the mother's educational attainment has the same impact as the father's on her children's educational attainment? In most studies of intergenerational mobility, the independent variable has always been the father's educational and occupational achievement, but as women have earned advanced degrees and moved into the labor force it is logical to argue that they should also have an effect on their children's educational attainment. You can access GSS data by going to the Survey Documentation and Analysis site at the University of California, Berkeley.

Once again, follow these steps:

1. Choose the Frequencies or crosstabulation option and then click "Start."
2. At the SDA Tables Program screen enter in ROW section, EDUC (r: 0-8 "< HS"; 9-11 "Some HS"; 12 "HS grad"; 13-15 "Some College"; 16 "College"; 17-20 "Graduate").
3. Your column variable will be the respondent's mother's educational attainment. For COLUMN type in: MAEDUC (r: 0-8 "< HS"; 9-11 "Some HS"; 12 "HS grad"; 13-15 "Some College"; 16 "College"; 17-20 "Graduate").
4. In Table Options box, click on Statistics, Text Question, and Color Coding before clicking "Run The Table" button.

Once you have obtained your output, you can fill in the cells in Table 2.

Writing Assignment 2:

What did you discover? What is the effect of a mother's educational attainment on her child's eventual educational attainment? If you found a similar pattern for both parents, how can you use your sociological imagination to explain this? Write about the ways in which each, or both, parents influence children's educational goals and achievements.

Part III:

You might wonder how the father's educational attainment compares with the mother's. In general, among married couples, women's educational attainment rarely exceeds those of her husband; generally, her education is equal to, or less than, his. If you are interested in investigating the correspondence between parents' level of educational attainment, return to the SDA Tables Program screen. For the Row variable enter MAEDUC (r: 0-8 "< HS"; 9-11 "Some HS"; 12 "HS grad"; 13-15 "Some College"; 16 "College"; 17-20 "Graduate") and for the Column variable enter PAEDUC (r: 0-8 "< HS"; 9-11 "Some HS"; 12 "HS grad"; 13-15 "Some College"; 16 "College"; 17-20 "Graduate"). Don't forget to click on Statistics, Text Question, and Color Coding before clicking "Run The Table" button. You can access GSS data by going to the Survey Documentation and Analysis site at the University of California, Berkeley.

Writing Assignment 3:

What did you find out about the relationship between these two variables? What factors related to marriage and family life would help to explain this relationship?

Part IV:

Writing Assignment 4/Essay:

Think about your own life. How do your own educational goals relate to your parents' educational achievements? In what ways have these goals been shaped by them? What advantages or disadvantages have you had in your own educational career because of your parents' level of education? Now, write an essay in which you discuss the relationship between parents' educational attainment and a child's. Do the findings from the General Social Survey support Bourdieu's cultural capital theory? Is this inevitable, or can something be done to eliminate the social reproduction of inequality?